– Sometimes I listen to Mariners games on the other team’s feed (you get a different assessment than from the Seattle announcers). Early this season, when they were playing the A’s, the radio guy said that there was another event at the same time as the game the following day, so everybody take public transportation. It wasn’t a wishy-washy you might want to consider type of thing. I don’t know if we need a system as comprehensive as BART before we can not be worried about getting stuck in traffic when we build sports stadiums.

Oh, and GWB43’s transcripts were a really important indicator that he was stoooopid, until it turned out that his grades were better than Kerry’s. Small wonder that there was no interest in Obama’s transcripts by the press in 2008. They might have found something unhelpful to their candidate had they looked.

Only the United Nations could top Obama awarding the Presidential Medal of Freedom to the self-avowed communist Dolores Huerta. The United Nations went lower with its decision to honor Zimbabwe murderer Robert Mugabe as an international tourism leader.

From the Romney slipping thread… I wrote “ylb placed his Politifact link “claiming” Obummer was a wise spender”

What’s weird is Politifact claimed it.

ylb farts: Yawwwnnn.. That’s a bald faced lie.. Never claimed that at all..

Lie upon lie upon lie.. Another day in Puddybud’s delusional universe.
05/31/2012 at 8:53 am

Here are the posts…

1. YLB spews:

Let’s rephrase this a bit.. On whose watch has federal spending grown SLOWER than moron Dumbya, Papa Dumbya and Ronnie “consult the star charts” Raygun?? Hell, make it every Prez after Ike.

Yes, it leaves only OBAMA..

Obama has indeed presided over the slowest growth in spending of any president using raw dollars, and it was the second-slowest if you adjust for inflation. The math simultaneously backs up Nutting’s calculations and demolishes Romney’s contention. The only significant shortcoming of the graphic is that it fails to note that some of the restraint in spending was fueled by demands from congressional Republicans. On balance, we rate the claim Mostly True.

Is this a good thing?? Hell no! The people need taxing and spending. We have a backlog of creaky infrastructure. Spending much more on that could have lifted us out of this Depression by now. Of course it’s the Republican’s fault things are so crappy.

28. YLB spews:

Obama’s National Debt Impact

Tell it to politifact dumbass. Slowest increase in spending since Ike.

Debt is increasing because of the Bush Depression.
05/29/2012 at 9:40 pm

29 – You’re lying again. I never “claimed” that Obama was a “wise spender”.. Never said those two words. I “claimed” something completely different and I even disapproved of it.

It’s obvious to anyone who can read.. That doesn’t include you of course.

And placed the blame where it belongs – on the degenerate right wing Republicans like the Paul Randroid Ryans, the crazy Michelle Bachmanns and the Steve Kings and their bat shit insane cheerleaders like you.

Actor Jimmy Stewart was a conservative and a male cheerleader — just like George W Bush and now Mitt Romney.

Can you guess the one physical trait that each had in common with the other?

Give up?

Each had nipples the size of pie tins — which caused them a great deal of grief as teenagers — but which each overcame with the extroverted acrivity of cheering the boys on in their athletic activities.

I had to look Artur Davis up. A black man who has become a republican. So? So is Herman “If you are poor, blame yourself” Cain. I don’t yet see a “Whites Only” rule on being republican.

Davis, who now lives in northern Virginia, ran in Alabama’s gubernatorial election in 2010. He lost the Democratic primary to Ron Sparks, who was later defeated by Republican Robert Bentley.
On April 3, 2009, Ron Sparks announced that he would run for governor of Alabama. In what was regarded as an upset, Sparks defeated Congressman Artur Davis in a landslide in the Democratic primary on June 1, 2010. Tensions over Davis’ opposition to healthcare reform legislation, along with Davis’ decision to not seek the support of traditional Democratic Party groups and his ignoring the needs of his constituents in his congressional district, led voters to overwhelmingly vote for Sparks in the Democratic Primary.[16]
Early in the 2010 campaign, Sparks voiced support for healthcare reform, opposed charter schools, supported the Stimulus, and advocated an educational lottery and gaming tax for pre-kindergarten and college scholarships.

Artur Davis, conservative democrat, lost in a primary to a Progressive Democrat. Imagine that. So he switched to being openly republican.

A little more than that. He seconded Obama’s nomination at the 2008 DNC convention. He was a regional co-chair of the DCCC.

He could be this election season’s Zell Miller. You remember Zell Miller, don’t you? While the DNC put up Al Sharpton and a 12-year old girl saying Dick Cheney needed a ‘time out’ at their convention, the GOP put out a seasoned Democrat who alleged that Kerry would defend our nation with spitballs.

C’mon, Obama himself suggested that his ascendency to the presidency would affect the elevation of the oceans. Remember that?

Nope. I voted for him so he’d do something about climate change.. And he started but Congress still isn’t ready and will never be ready until there’s a catastrophic crisis as if the weather in TX wasn’t bad enough.

If he considers himself to be some sort of a deity, can you blame us if we mock him as messianic?

I see no evidence of that.. I see plenty of evidence of delusional perceptions by right wingers that are driven by loathing of a politician from a big city rising to the White House.

Really, if you guys would learn to mock him, as you seem to have no trouble doing with any GOP politician, you would be far, far better off.

Oh Bob. Bush let down scores of social and even economic conservatives and we never heard anything like mockery. They just stayed home rather than break the 11th commandment.

We’d be better off with sane politicians and they’re not coming from the Republicans.

I’m voting for Obama for the Supreme Court justices. Kagan and Sotomayor were sane choices. Alito and Roberts not so much. I can only imagine Mitt checking in with ALEC or the Chamber for who he’d put up.

this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal

Doesn’t sound like the accomplishment of a mere mortal to me.

Of course, we all could have just waited a couple of years without doing anything at all and it would be clear the the oceans weren’t rising any more than they had in the past. But that’s a different story.

I see it makes you uncomfortable that I might vote for obama..why is that?

Look loser, your a failure, just accept it. Your life, the rabbits, revolves around this blog…truly pathetic indeed. To me, this blog is brief little comical distraction, to you its life itself…you rate your self worth by what happens here. Its another reason why you will never ever be a man or successful.

I know the shit you’ve posted here. If you hate the poor, like you do and can’t stand to see them get food stamps, nutrition assistance for their kids (WIC), school lunches, preschool, shabby public housing, EITC and the like..

You have only ONE choice – Romney who says he supports the Ryan plan which will cut all of that.

Clueless arschloch ylb, unlike you I don’t need to replay myself over and over. 37 of those 54 attack links are repeats with 4 of them tri-peats. Oh the horror! For the clueless! BTW why didn’t you leave on November 10th 2006, since your work was done at 10:10AM? HAHAHAHAHAHA!

EPIC FAYLE! It’s chronicled on HA, you have it and that’s all everyone needs to know.

“The reason for keeping it quiet is because we knew if word got out that Solyndra would do everything in their power and the Obama administration would do everything in their power to stop us from having this news conference,” an aide said in a briefing en route. “But taxpayers made a substantial investment in Solyndra, there are serious questions about what happened at Solyndra, why that investment was selected, what happened to that money.”

After 9 days of jury deliberations, John Edwards was found innocent on one count, and the judge declared a mistrial on the remaining counts because the jury couldn’t reach a decision. Edwards may be completely off the hook if prosecutors decide not to retry him on those charges.

So I heard some jackass on Medved’s show today advocating changing the constitutional amendment process to include majority vote national citizen initiatives. Hey, there’s a great idea, where has that been tried?

Oh, California where approved propositions become constitutional amendments nearly impossible to undo. Regardless of spending cuts vs. Taxation the underlying source of California’s problems stem from initiatives. Be it Prop. 13 that kneecapped the state’s ability to raise revenue in line with population growth to the hundreds of mandated constitutional funding levels for education, child health, anti-smoking, prison construction etc (see there’s
huge problems caused by both right and left leaning propositions) the percentage of the budget that doesn’t fall under constitutionally “untouchable” spending or tax increases has made the state in downturns impossible to balance.

But, checkmate@109, this guy is against the US Constitution as being outdated, a leftist position. He wants to get rid of the Electoral College, a Hillary Clinton position. Then he penned this on the Bush/Gore decision in The Nation

The Court’s decision in Bush v. Gore, however, seems an exercise in low rather than high politics. How can one take seriously the majority’s claims that their award of the presidency to Bush is based on their deep concern for safeguarding the fundamental values of equality? This majority has been infamous in recent years for relentlessly defending states’ rights against the invocation of national legal or constitutional norms. Bush v. Gore is all too easily explainable as the decision by five conservative Republicans–at least two of whom are eager to retire and be replaced by Republicans nominated by a Republican President–to assure the triumph of a fellow Republican who might not become President if Florida were left to its own legal process.

Of course, a consistent realist might point to tension between the generally nationalist, equality-protecting positions taken by the dissenters and their esteem in Bush v. Gore for state autonomy and, concomitantly, for the different standards being applied in various county recounts. It is decidedly “unrealist” to denounce one group of judges as behaving politically while praising another for simply following the “rule of law.” Rodell or any other hard-core realist would deride any praise of the Florida Supreme Court for its wisdom in construing the Florida statutes. Those judges, too, could easily be depicted as Democratic partisans manipulating the law to serve their political favorite, Al Gore.

There are legitimate considerations about removing the electoral college as an anachronistic institution. That wasn’t my point. Should I be surprised that you moved to a separate and irrelevant part of his thesis? (“Show me where I brought up the electoral college? You made that up. I never did. Toooooooo daaaaaaammmnnnn ffffffuuuuuunnnnnnyyyyyy.” Puddy, or words to that effect a couple hundred times on HA.)

He was advocating the possibility of making it easier to amend the constitution by simple majority popular vote at one point. I’m not terribly up in arms over it since it would take a 2/3rds constitutional ammendment to create his proposed remedy. But in the best mega-population observable case of such a proposal, that’s California if you aren’t keeping up, Pud, that’s a laughably idiotic proposition. A professor, or any serious person, would entertain that thought for a nanosecond before deciding, “What the eff, that can’t work. It would be chaos.”

In an interview with The Desert Sun, Grenell said: “The far left doesn’t want a gay person to be conservative and the far right doesn’t want a conservative to be gay. Some of the most hateful, mean-spirited intolerant comments about me being the foreign policy and national security spokesman for Governor Romney … were coming from the left.”

and

But his tweet about openly-gay newscaster Rachel Maddow especially angered many fellow gays and lesbians. Grenell seemed to mock her as being too masculine and a lesbian stereotype, saying, “Rachel Maddow needs to take a breath and put on a necklace.”

There are legitimate considerations about removing the electoral college as an anachronistic institution. That wasn’t my point.

Where did I say anything you wrote in that post was your point? Again YOU don’t get it either. This is a well known leftist law professor. He’s published in The Nation. All of those comments are his statements, made over the years. I gave you examples!

Great job conflating standard liberal nothingness into pixels except it’s an EPIC FAYLE. I am shocked you called him a moron!

Seems that puddy’s posts over the last few days have demonstrated an accelerating mania, an increasingly obnoxious and irrational writing style, a relentless flood of gibberish and accusation and insult.

I’ve come to the conclusion, repeatedly, that there’s no point in engaging him – though I have repeatedly succumbed to the temptation to do so when confronted by the outrageousness of his claims, the manifest ignorance and mean-spiritedness, the absolute insanity of a Young Earth Creationist, Muslim-hating, gay-hating Dominionist lecturing this otherwise fine group of citizens* about…anything.

Notice how puddy uses the self-serving comments of self-identified Rmoney supporter to tar leftists as anti-gay.

Hey dickhead, those were his words. I found them today scanning the nets. Scary he nails leftist gays and smacks them silly.

You Lib da moron, can’t stand anyone challenging you. And you call yourself a scientist? WTF? Never challenge my hypotheses. As you pass a mirror and look yourself in the eyes “I am a legend in my own mind.”

Under the deal, automatic pension increases would be suspended for a decade, future pensions would be capped and the most generous pension plans would be eliminated. The deal would also move retired city workers ages 65 and older into Medicare.

The changes are expected to help the city save $18.5 million next fiscal year….

Is there any wonder that a hell-storm of leading LGBT and feminists pushed back at a statement like that? As far as I can tell this guy has only victimized himself. Puddy needs to find some other poster-boy. Grenell just comes across as an arrogant dick casting about for somebody to blame for his own self-destruction.

Dr. Dean Kenyon: Discovery Institute doyenne and “Intelligent Design” proponent. Good link on the equality of ‘creationism’ and ‘intelligent design’. As you might say, ’nuff said sucka.

Dr J Walter Vieth:
From a website promoting this crackpot:

He is an ardent student of Biblical prophecy and trusts the veracity of the Bible, which he believes is proved by the science of archaeology as well as the fulfilment of numerous prophecies found in the Bible.

Ergo, not a scientist.

Simon Conway Morris:
Not sure why you include him, other than that he seems to be a self-identified Christian. Does not seem to belong in your rogues’ gallery, as he gave this lecture:

He gave the University of Edinburgh Gifford Lectures for 2007 in a series titled “Darwin’s Compass: How Evolution Discovers the Song of Creation“. In these lectures Conway Morris makes several claims that evolution may be compatible with belief in the existence of a God.

In 1966 he published the book Herkunft und Zukunft des Menschen which promoted Burdick’s and other’s claims that dinosaur and human footprints existed together at Paluxy River….In the mid 1980s the footprints were shown to be not of human origin, and some specimens were shown to be doctored or carved…

According to the National Center for Science Education, Wilder-Smith’s 1981 work The Natural Sciences Know Nothing of Evolution contains a variety of falsehoods and errors. Kenneth Christiansen, Professor of Biology at Grinnell College, reviewed the book stating “the most fundamental flaw of the book is an apparent confusion or ignorance (it is hard to tell) concerning our present understanding of the evolutionary process.” He further noted that Wilder-Smith’s work disregarded basic literature in the field discussed.

CRRRAAAACKKKPPOTTTT!!

Dr. William Kane:
Some sort of engineer, likely not qualified to comment critically on evolution. Can’t really find anything about him, other that being on a list of supporters on the ‘answersingenesis.org’ site – sort of the mothership of crackpot Young Earth Creationists.
WWWWOOOOOOOOOO…

Lanny and Marilyn Johnson:
From a website lauding these two nuts:

Lanny and Marilyn Johnson are former evolutionists trained in the sciences. Creation teaching was instrumental in bringing them to a settled assurance that all of God’s Word can be trusted. In 1993, God led them to join Alpha Omega Institute and establish the Children’s Ministry to fortify children with the truth of the Bible and to help them avoid the pitfalls of evolution.

“Trained in the sciences”, “God’s words can be trusted”, “avoid the pitfalls of evolution”

Puddles, you make my case for me.

*****

I’ve had enough – this is silly. You are a Young Earth Creationist, and that’s nuts. It’s a reflection of your complete lack of credibility and absent powers of critical thinking.

If you fools (puddles, and Max, and whoever else wants to join them) want to deny science – go ahead, great, get your freak on – just don’t try to highjack the credibility of bona fide scientists with the “Intelligent Design” bullshit or the Bible Science bullshit, or whatever it’s called.
If you want to believe the universe is 6000 years old and Jeebus rode a dinosaur and Noah teleported penguins from Antarctica – DO IT – just be prepared for the rational people of the world pointing and laughing at you – which is what I’m doing around here every fucking day.

In 1966 he published the book Herkunft und Zukunft des Menschen which promoted Burdick’s and other’s claims that dinosaur and human footprints existed together at Paluxy River….In the mid 1980s the footprints were shown to be not of human origin, and some specimens were shown to be doctored or carved…

So…both stupid, and a fraud. These are the paragons of puddles worldview. Says a great deal.

With all the talk last week about Bain Capitol, I remembered reading a story awhile back, actually a couple, in TRAINS Magazine about the fight between a hedge fund, and CSX Corporation. CSX barely survived the takeover, and has rebounded from past mistakes made years before the fight happened(by a CEO who later became Secretary of the Treasury in the Bush Administration). An editor with Railway Age magazine is suspect about hedge funds and railroads. It’s happening again, this time with Canadian Pacific(despite it’s name, they have holdings in the US, the remnants of the former Milwaukee Road, and the Delaware and Hudson), but this time it’s different and will give them the benefit of the doubt. The new fund, has a CEO waiting in the winds, so good at his job, his former employer cut his Golden Parachute(after turning Canadian National around, he deserved it, but he violated the non-compete clause).

Now can a big railroad shed some parts and stay profitable? They do it all the time, with unprofitable branch lines. It’s just the nature of the business that seems investors only interested in the short term make some in the railroad industry nervous. Railroads(even Amtrak to a small extent) own their right of way, which means to be able to stay competitive, it’s not just labor and fuel they have to worry about, but the track. Failure to invest in it’s upkeep, puts future profits at risk. Same with capacity constraints. BNSF, which is owned by Warren Buffet’s company, is in it for the long haul, and with no shareholders to report to, BNSF has completed an ambitious capacity expansion on their Chicago-LA mainline. Doubletracking everything in Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, and Tripletracking portions like Cajon Pass in California. This actually had been planned in the nineties, but shareholders supposedly got nervous. After the Berkshire Hathaway takeover, not too many shareholders to be nervous.

On this blog I placed his own words where he claimed to have performed 9000+ late term abortions. Ask the dumbASS clueless deranged debazed databaze arschloch ylb for evidence. Go on. Ask him. Grow some marbuls!

And of course Schilling is also a longtime loud-mouthed, ultra-conservative, rich Tea Party moron from way back who regularly bemoans that the government takes money that he could be using to create jobs. “I’m not looking, never have been, for handouts,” he told Sean Hannity in March. In May, Schilling’s government-handout-supported company missed a $1 million payment, stopped paying its employees, and begged for millions in tax credits from the state that it could sell to stay afloat.

I’ve never taken a penny and I’ve done nothing but create jobs and create economy. And so how does that translate into welfare baby? I’ve tried to do right by people.

See, Curt, it translates into “welfare baby” because you are … begging the government to give you more money.

I think these right-wingers are delusional.

Does anyone think that Mittens is going to rush from his photo-op in the Solyndra parking lot to Schilling’s company and bemoan government intervention and crony capitalism?

Ouch. Maybe time for Obama to stop pounding Romney for the sin of having been in business and time for Obama to start figuring out what he needs to do differently to make sure June and July don’t look as bad as May did:

Note that not only did May’s numbers suck, but the March and April numbers were revised substantially downward. Obama’s been running on empty for months, but even the fumes in the tank have been combusted and there’s absolutely nothing left.

Good thing Darryl’s poll says Obama still has a 99.9% chance of being re-elected, because otherwise your lyin’ eyes might have you believe he’s in some serious trouble here.

measure used by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) states that “a recession is a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in real GDP, real income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales.”

Just in time for the general election campaign.

Nice goin’, Dems. I’d prefer a better economy and a closer election than this will be if we’re in recession by mid-summer.

It was a line near the end of Romney’s ad that caught my attention: “The Inspector General said contracts were steered to ‘friends and family.’” That sounded like news. I’ve spent two years in stimulus-world, and I had no idea an inspector general had said that. I asked the Romney campaign for documentation, and it produced a Newsweek article asserting that Energy Department inspector general Gregory Friedman “has testified that contracts have been steered to ‘friends and family.’”

Except that Newsweek article was an excerpt from the book “Throw Them All Out,” written by Peter Schweizer, a right-winger who has served as an adviser to Sarah Palin’s PAC, edited one of Andrew Breitbart’s websites, and written a slew of books portraying liberals as pond scum. Not exactly a disinterested source. And it turns out that the inspector general never testified that stimulus contracts were steered to friends and family.

Why can’t Republicans not lie?

Mittens seems to embody this trait – he seems to be a pathological liar, like a dry drunk, someone that likes to, needs to, teeter on the edge, thrilled by the possibility of getting away with it, no concern for the ruin with which he flirts…

It’s one of the central reasons, I think, that as people better get to know Romney, the less they like him. He sets off peoples’ bullshit detectors, he is not genuine, he is not authentic. We’ve all had this experience – there are people we meet all the time that are just manifestly, obviously full of shit, and Romney is one of them.

Lemme get this straight: A candidate’s staff uses as a source a MSM article that turns out to be incorrect and that means such use constitutes a LIE?

Are you fully willing to apply the same criteria to Obama’s side? Methinks likely not.

Way to glean the importance out of a news item, Lib Sci. Obama’s team is responsible for a half-billion loss to the US taxpayer on this one small company alone and your bullet point is that what’s important is that Romney’s a liar.

@ 166

I see you are laboring to compare Solyndra to the Schilling debacle. Um, fair enough, although that compares Obama team’s incompetence to that of someone other than Mitt Romney. And since we’re all about comparisons:

You’re the Commander-in-Chief of the most powerful country in the world. Your nation’s economy is sputtering, job creation essentially cut by two-thirds in only a couple of months. The stock market is plummeting 200 points after a disastrous jobs report.

Do you hunker down with your Council of Economic Advisers and hammer out some sort of program, some sort of solution to this growing problem?

How much trouble are the unions in? It might not even be necessary to alter collective bargaining and pension and health care contributions. What if the municipalities just refused to continue collecting the unions’ dues for them?

Much of that decline came from Afscme Council 24, which represents Wisconsin state workers, whose membership plunged by two-thirds to 7,100 from 22,300 last year.

The Obama administration is spinning this morning’s bad unemployment numbers with the following statement from Alan B. Krueger, the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers.

“Today we learned that the economy has added private sector jobs for 27 straight months, for a total of 4.3 million payroll jobs over that period. The economy is growing but it is not growing fast enough.” he writes, emphazing areas in the economy that continue to grow.

“As the Administration stresses every month, the monthly employment and unemployment figures can be volatile, and employment estimates can be subject to substantial revision,” he cautioned. “Therefore, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report and it is helpful to consider each report in the context of other data that are becoming available.”

I guess Obama has been LYING to the public all along, then.
President Barack Obama is confiding to Democratic donors that he may have to revisit the health-care issue in a second term, a position at odds with his publicly expressed confidence that the U.S. Supreme Court will uphold the Affordable Care Act, according to three Democratic activists.

One thing you probably should admit is that it’s easier for Romney to compete with Obama when the only competent Democrat to hold the White House in the past generation tells the world that Romney’s qualified to hold the office and that his Bain work is a plus in that regard:

Sahil Kapur-June 1, 2012, 7:00 AM6089
Over the last week, the signals have been abundant that congressional Republicans are pivoting from their total opposition to “Obamacare” toward supporting the more popular chunks of the law.

It’s an election-year strategy to mitigate the fallout if the Supreme Court grants them their wish and strikes down the law next month. The House GOP is weighing a replacement plan to reinstate its more popular components, such as guaranteeing coverage regardless of pre-existing conditions, letting people under 26 stay on a parent’s policy and closing the Medicare “doughnut hole.” The idea is also percolating among Senate Republicans.

Publicly at least, numerous GOP leaders are sticking to the anti-Obamacare script. Many Republicans aides and sources close to leadership declined to weigh in, but the rest said discussions have been brewing.

“I think it is all part of the fact that repeal was so far away in 2010 and even in 2011. Now, as the possibility arises that part of the law could be repealed is only a month away, there is some disorder,” said a well-connected health industry lobbyist and former GOP aide.

Hayworth Spokesman: ‘Hurl Some Acid At Those Female Democratic Senators’

Pema Levy-May 31, 2012, 3:53 PM29030
Jay Townsend, a campaign spokesman for Republican Rep. Nan Hayworth (NY-19), weighed in on a local Facebook discussion with a violent comment about Democratic women in Congress, and his suggestion is now earning the congresswoman condemnation from one of her Democratic challengers.

The Facebook page, called NY19 U.S. House of Representatives Discussion Center, encourages “civil multi-partisan discussion about issues impacting citizens of New York’s U.S. House District represented by Republican Congresswoman Nan Hayworth.” On it, a question about gas prices was also critical of Hayworth. Townsend responded to one commenter, Tom, by bringing up the “war on women” and suggested they “hurl some acid at those female democratic Senators.”

The comment:

Listen to Tom. What a little bee he has in his bonnet. Buzz Buzz. My question today … when is Tommy boy going to weigh in on all the Lilly Ledbetter hypocrites who claim to be fighting the War on Women? Let’s hurl some acid at those female democratic Senators who won’t abide the mandates they want to impose on the private sector.

Bet “Bob” just looooves this shit…gotta love these assholes like “Bob”.

Tom Kludt-June 1, 2012, 11:36 AM1733
Ed Gillespie, a senior campaign adviser to Mitt Romney, struggled to clarify the Republican nominee’s position on Russia during a television appearance Friday, marking a return to foreign policy turf on which Romney has already been chided.

Appearing on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Gillespie, a former counselor to President George W. Bush and chairman of the Republican National Committee, was pressed by Chuck Todd to draw a distinction between Romney and President Barack Obama’s foreign policy positions, including on Syria. Gillespie said that Romney supports arming the Syrian rebels, but Todd reminded him that the former Massachusetts governor did not endorse direct involvement from the United States — making his position virtually indistinguishable from Obama’s.

But Gillespie waded into even murkier territory when it came to Russia. He criticized Vladimir Putin for “not being helpful at all to the United States” and took aim at the Obama administration for allowing U.S. relations with Russia to grow increasingly frosty — seemingly contradictory assertions, as Todd pointed out:

GILLESPIE: And I think when you look at Russia and the relationship with Russia, the so-call reset button, it’s clear that the Russians are not being helpful at all to the United States, and that that effort to reset has failed.
TODD: So what you’re saying is, get confrontational? Let’s talk about Russia. So, get more confrontational with Russia? Is that the difference? How do you do that?

GILLESPIE: Well, I think what it is, Chuck, is to try to work with them to align our interests more, and to reduce their hostility, which this president has not been able to do. Clearly, despite his pledges during the campaign and afterward that we were going to have this great relationship and Russia was going to be better with Russia. It is not better with Russia today than it was when President Obama took office. Do you think it’s better today, the relationship with Russia, than when President Obama took office?

TODD: No, I don’t. But what I’m saying, how do you change it? Is more confrontation better?

GILLESPIE: I think that Russia understands that when there’s a strong president who can work with Germany, our allies in Europe and France, you can get better results from Russia if you have a strong leader who is working with our allies in Europe. They’ll respond to that.

Gillespie’s call for a restoration in U.S.-Russia relations conflicted with Romney’s contention in March that Russia is the U.S.’s “No. 1 geopolitical foe.” It also represented a rare instance in which the Romney camp acknowledged a need to strengthen ties with Europe. Romney routinely cautions voters on the campaign trail that the United States must avoid going down the same path as Europe, a point he made again earlier this week when discussing national security before a crowd of veterans.

This is how sharp that fucking Romney crowd is. They’d run the country real good.

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) – Former U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens has said he expects the court has already had second thoughts about parts of its controversial Citizens United ruling that eased restrictions on corporate spending in political campaigns.

By Danny Johnston, AP
Former U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens speaks in Little Rock, Ark., on Wednesday.
EnlargeClose
By Danny Johnston, AP
Former U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens speaks in Little Rock, Ark., on Wednesday.

Sponsored LinksThe sharply divided court ruled that independent spending by corporations does “not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.” Stevens, who dissented from that 2010 decision, said that at some point the court will have to issue an opinion “explicitly crafting an exception that will create a crack in the foundation” of that ruling.

Speaking to hundreds of people at a Wednesday night event in Little Rock, the retired justice said President Obama accurately criticized the ruling for reversing a century of law and allowing special interest groups to pump money into elections.

He cited Justice Samuel Alito’s reaction to Obama’s criticism, along with one of the court’s later rulings when the justices rejected a free-speech challenge from humanitarian aid groups to a law that bars support to terrorist organizations.

Stevens said “the fact that the proposed speech would indirectly benefit a terrorist organization provided a sufficient basis for denying it First Amendment protection.”

He also pointed to televised debates when moderators try to allow candidates equal time to express their views. He said candidates and viewers wouldn’t like it if there were an auction giving the most time to the highest bidder.

“Yet that is essentially what happens during actual campaigns in which rules equalizing campaign expenditures are forbidden,” he said.

Stevens spoke in Arkansas the day after Obama presented him with the Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.

Aside from criticizing the Citizens United decision, Stevens also took a jab at the Bush v. Gore case after an audience member asked him about it.

“I think you have to have confidence that the justices will do their best to not make that same mistake again,” he said to laughter and applause.

Stevens was nominated to the Supreme Court by President Gerald Ford, and he served on the high court from 1975 until he retired in 2010. Obama nominated Justice Elena Kagan to replace him.

Stevens recently wrote a memoir about his time on the court, Five Chiefs: A Supreme Court Memoir.

In between signing copies of the book Wednesday night, he was asked whether he would want to sit on the court to hear the case challenging the new federal health care law.

“I’m convinced that my decision to resign was absolutely right,” he said. “I’m slowing down. I’ve been replaced by a brilliant justice and I’m happy to have her do the work that I used to do.”

If they can’t lie, cheat or steal…these assholes like “Bob”…they can’t win.

Mitt Romney’s pitch is that he’s a “businessman” who understands the “real economy,” in contrast to President Obama who Romney says “doesn’t understand how the economy works.” During a presidential debate in November, Romney reminded the audience of the source of his “real economy” experience: “I worked at one company, Bain, for 25 years.” That quote has now been replayed thousands of times in Romney television ads in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Florida and has been viewed more than 168,000 times on YouTube.

Here’s how the Los Angeles Times described Romney’s tenure as CEO of Bain Capital:

Romney and his team also maximized returns by firing workers, seeking government subsidies, and flipping companies quickly for large profits. Sometimes Bain investors gained even when companies slid into bankruptcy.

Romney himself became wealthy at Bain. He is now worth between $190 million and $250 million, much of it derived from his time running the investment firm, his campaign staffers have said.

Bain managers said their mission was clear. “I never thought of what I do for a living as job creation,” said Marc B. Walpow, a former managing partner at Bain who worked closely with Romney for nine years before forming his own firm. “The primary goal of private equity is to create wealth for your investors.”

Here’s the rundown on Mitt Romney’s devastating record as CEO of Bain Capital, a tenure marked by bankruptcies, bailouts, and mass layoffs — all while Romney and his partners raked in billions of dollars in profits for the firm and Romney himself amassed a quarter-billion dollar fortune.

Romney’s Bain Capital Caused Mass Layoffs, Sent Jobs Overseas

Thousands of Americans were laid off by Bain Capital at companies it purchased, managed, and, at least a quarter of the time, drove into bankruptcy. Here’s an infographic from Americans United for Change laying out some of the carnage:

The national debate over private equity so far has hinged on the question of whether experience in the field qualifies Mitt Romney, the former Bain Capital executive, for the presidency. But a more vexing, and largely unanswered, question lies just beneath the surface: How is it, exactly, that an investment company can make millions even as the company it’s ostensibly trying to turn around goes bust?

For that answer, we turned to what may seem like a less-than-reliable source: Tony Soprano.

The investors profit, it turns out, not despite the failure of the company, but in fact because of it.

In the organized crime world, the business practice is known as a bust out. A group of investors — in Soprano’s case, an entire family — looks for companies that have a strong underlying business but are in distress thanks to heavy debt burdens. The investors then take over the company. In the mob’s case, the family presents the business with a very high-interest loan — an offer which, under the financial circumstances, is difficult to refuse — and effectively takes control of the company with the threat of physical violence. Private equity investors, by contrast, buy control of the company’s board by purchasing the firm’s stock. But for both private equity firms and the mafia, investors use their control of the firm to take on more debt, while at the same time cutting costs by laying off workers.

Cash from the loans and cost savings are funneled back to the investors. This looting continues until the company can’t pay its debts. When it finally collapses, the company files for bankruptcy to extinguish the debt — but private equity investors, as well as mobsters, get to keep the gains they’ve already reaped.

Neither were many other (any other?) A-list stars, but a Mitt Romney fundraiser at the Beverly Hills Hotel on Thursday night put the lie to the notion that everybody in Hollywood is supporting President Obama’s reelection bid.

At least 425 people in the liberal heart of filmdom are apparently in Romney’s camp. “There are many, many Romney backers in our community, and we’ll just have to see what happens going toward the election,” said one of them, actor Jon Voight, who was an A-lister back in the day.

Also in attendance: Scott Baio, of “Happy Days” fame, and Jane Romney, of Romney family fame (the candidate’s sister). Tickets to the event ranged from $2,500 to $50,000.

General Motors is paying its bailout loans back in full and ahead of schedule.

“Today, General Motors is announcing that it has made a payment of $5.8 billion to the U.S. Treasury and Export Development Canada. We’re paying back — in full, with interest, years ahead of schedule — loans made to help fund the new GM,” CEO Edward Whitacre announced in an opinion piece in the The Wall Street Journal.

The U.S. is owed a payment of $4.7 billion and Canada $1.1 billion, when accounting for exchange rates, as part of GM’s bailout package, according to a Reuters report.

%%DynaPub-Enhancement class=”enhancement contentType-HTML Content fragmentId-24139 payloadId-101546 alignment-left size-small”%%Taxpayers and the government are now waiting for the next GM payout, which will come when the company launches an IPO and the U.S. can extract itself from ownership in the slimmed down auto giant and its $50 billion bailout.

Ownership stakes in GM were doled out following the company’s bankruptcy last year, in which the automaker executed an amazingly quick turnaround in 40 days, exiting bankruptcy in July. The bailout package gave the U.S. Treasury a 60.8% percent stake in the now privately held GM, and Export Development Canada an 11.7% stake.

Following GM’s announcement today that it has repaid the $5.8 billion in U.S. and Canadian loans months ahead of schedule, you may be wondering how exactly the automaker managed this. The answer is a $16.4 billion escrow account set up by the Obama administration during GM’s bankruptcy. Those funds are in exchange for the GM shares that make up part of the government’s stake in the company.
The Treasury Department had to figure out how much of a cushion the company would need after emerging from bankruptcy. The escrow account was set up when the government bought a 61% stake in the company, but there was a string attached: GM had to get the Treasury Department’s OK before spending the money.

Thus far, it used the fund to pay out $2.7 billion for the Delphi bankruptcy resolution and previous loan repayments. Rules required any money left in the account by June 30 to be used for loan repayment.

Right wing falls in love with Mitt Romney … because they finally realize he’s kind of a jerk+*by Jed Lewison Follow

Still the same guy…

McKay Coppins takes a look at how (and why) America’s right is falling in love with Mitt Romney:

After a day spent waging bi-coastal combat with the Obama campaign, Mitt Romney’s team in Boston earned the highest compliment Rush Limbaugh has ever paid them Thursday afternoon: “I’m telling you,” he said. “This is not the McCain campaign.”
Once-skeptical conservatives knew exactly what he meant. In the eyes of many on the right, John McCain’s 2008 presidential bid was a disaster not because he lost, but because he refused to fight. Conservatives believe McCain bought into a liberal media narrative that personal attacks on Barack Obama were unseemly and even racist. The conservative caricature of Candidate McCain that emerged in the wake of the Republicans’ defeat wasn’t of an unreliable moderate — rather, it was one of an Establishment figure paralyzed by political correctness, and unwilling to go blow for blow with Obama.

But if the Vietnam veteran disappointed conservatives with his gun-shy campaign in 2008, Romney is uniting the right by playing the role of the bomb-thrower.

To put it another way, these conservatives are realizing that Mitt Romney, Cranbook’s senior bully, and Mitt Romney, 2012 Republican nominee, are one and the same—and they’d love nothing more than to see Eric Fehrnstrom pin President Obama to the floor as Willard shaves that crazy hair right off Obama’s head, lest it turn into an Afro.

They really aren’t paying attention the substance of what he says, at least when it comes to policy, because so much of what Romney says on policy is a jumbled mess of contradictions and falsehoods. But when Romney goes after Obama, it really gets them hot-and-bothered.</blockquote>

Following GM’s announcement today that it has repaid the $5.8 billion in U.S. and Canadian loans months ahead of schedule, you may be wondering how exactly the automaker managed this. The answer is a $16.4 billion escrow account set up by the Obama administration during GM’s bankruptcy. Those funds are in exchange for the GM shares that make up part of the government’s stake in the company.
The Treasury Department had to figure out how much of a cushion the company would need after emerging from bankruptcy. The escrow account was set up when the government bought a 61% stake in the company, but there was a string attached: GM had to get the Treasury Department’s OK before spending the money.

Thus far, it used the fund to pay out $2.7 billion for the Delphi bankruptcy resolution and previous loan repayments. Rules required any money left in the account by June 30 to be used for loan repayment. With the loans fully repaid, restrictions on the escrow fund will be lifted and GM will be allowed add the remaining $5.5 billion to its reserves.

So what’s the bottom line?

Essentially, GM no longer needs emergency government aid to stay afloat. While the taxpayer still has a sizable investment wrapped up in the automaker, GM has returned to decent health for the time being.

Rujax, every bit of that was funded by the US taxpayer, and what the taxpayer got in return is about 50% underwater from break-even.

There’s nothing, really, to be proud about. Had GM gone through a normal bankrupcy there would still be a GM. Unions wouldn’t be sitting as pretty and the bondholders would have done better, but GM would still be there.

GM pours one pool of money into the hole it created when it used the other pool of money.

Rujax does a victory dance because the hole is filled.

This is Democratic thought, boiled down to its most simplistic terms.

I won’t even get into the special tax treatment given to GM by the IRS due to its pre-bankruptcy losses, which ends up further screwing the US taxpayer. Rujax is still moving his lips when he reads.

06/01/2012 at 11:09 am

“Bob” is an ignorant ass…as we all know.

So “Bob” would destroy ANOTHER important domestic industry and throw hundreds of thousands of Americans out of work.

“Bob” is soooooooo smart.

But for a real “scholar” like “Bob” the BILLIONS of dollars of subsidies for petroleum companies are okee dokee. Gee…why should we subsidize an INSANELY profitable business? “Bob” must know…because nobody else does.

OH…and where was “Bob” and his ilk when the corrupt Cheney/Rumsfeld Administration “lost” NINE BILLION DOLLARS of American Taxpayer Money, money that “Bob” is sooooo protective of…

A lone Scott Walker supporter was arrested at a campaign rally for Milwaukee mayor Tom Barrett today, where Bill Clinton also spoke. The man had been arguing with rally attendees since before the rally began, and held a sign that said “Support Scott Walker, Not Union Thugs.”http://www.democraticunderground.com/1002753352

While there were hundreds of Barrett signs throughout the park, one Walker supporter stood nearby holding a sign that said, “Support Scott Walker, Not Union Thugs.”
After Clinton spoke, the man moved forward to a rope line where Clinton was shaking hands and posing for pictures. Asked by police officers to back away, the man apparently refused.
He was later taken away by officers and was arrested. An officer said the man would be charged with disorderly conduct.http://www.jsonline.com/blogs/news/156355605.html

Until I get more information, it seems to be a big deal only in your head.

Yeah, that’s what I saw online as well. Waiting for video, as apparently there were a bazillion photogs there.

Another source, tweeted, said he was arrested for sticking his finger in the cop’s face during an exchange and that he was 30 feet from Clinton.

John McCormack@McCormackJohn Follow
@rosiegray Saw the arrest take place. Cop said it was because protester pointed his finger in cop’s face when cop told him to leave.
01 Jun 2012 ReplyRetweetFavorite
John McCormack@McCormackJohn Follow
@rosiegray Cop also said Willoughby’s sign was “too close to the President”… But Willoughby was 30 feet from Clinton.

They are without principle, other than to shill for their wealthy masters.
They don’t care about jobs, they don’t care about a healthy economy, they deny the notion that we are a nation of equals or that we’re all in this together. They are only here to mainline the daily fascist talking points, to pick fights that they wage without honesty or without integrity.

They don’t care about the government losing money in GM or Solyndra – no, not really – they care about a Democratic administration being successful, and will fling any lie to achieve their end, sacrifice any ethic, fling any shit. Wasting money is actually a virtue for them, but it has to be a Republican doing it in the service of weakening government and steering money to their cronies. You know when a Republican screams “Cronism!” that they’re really pissed that it’s money they didn’t get their hands on.

There is not objective principle that they will adhere to when analyzing government action regardless of party. They will say anything because they cannot tell the truth. Oligarchy doesn’t sell so well when you pitch it on the merits. Therefore they are inherently dishonest, and it’s a complete waste of time to do anything but ridicule them.

About the guy at the Barrett rally, when you’re within 30 feet of the President, and you don’t follow a lawful request to move, and, moreover, you stick your finger in a cop’s face and argue, be prepared to be arrested.

If those are indeed the facts.

If bub is so incensed about this guy having his First Amendment right abridged, perhaps he’d like to comment on all the Bush rallies in which citizens were ejected or detained simply for having T-shirts that disagreed with Bush.

Oops! Probably more a case of being kinda dim and poorly represented than anything.

Seminole County Circuit Court Judge Kenneth Lester revoked the bail for Zimmerman — who is facing a second-degree murder charge in the shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin — after finding that Zimmerman and his wife concealed their access to a $200,000 account during a bond hearing in April.

211. Liberal Scientist is a slut who occasionally wears a hoodie spews:
Bob is a troll. Puddy is a troll. Max is a troll.

They are without principle, other than to shill for their wealthy masters.
They don’t care about jobs, they don’t care about a healthy economy, they deny the notion that we are a nation of equals or that we’re all in this together. They are only here to mainline the daily fascist talking points, to pick fights that they wage without honesty or without integrity.

They don’t care about the government losing money in GM or Solyndra – no, not really – they care about a Democratic administration being successful, and will fling any lie to achieve their end, sacrifice any ethic, fling any shit. Wasting money is actually a virtue for them, but it has to be a Republican doing it in the service of weakening government and steering money to their cronies. You know when a Republican screams “Cronism!” that they’re really pissed that it’s money they didn’t get their hands on.

There is not objective principle that they will adhere to when analyzing government action regardless of party. They will say anything because they cannot tell the truth. Oligarchy doesn’t sell so well when you pitch it on the merits. Therefore they are inherently dishonest, and it’s a complete waste of time to do anything but ridicule them.

Point and laugh.

06/01/2012 AT 12:39 PM

LMFAO….awwww, I sense much frustration from poor lab tech…so in a fit of misery, the lab tech lashes out…

Bob reminds me of this conservative joke that has been told here before.

A group of protester were in front of a military base, protesting the war
A conservative targets one off to one side and goes up to him, and decks him, knocking him down.
“Hey man” the protester says as he gets up, stunned.
The conservative decks him again, knocking him down.
“That is NOT cool” the liberal says as he gets up, getting angry.
The conservative decks him again, knocking him down.
The liberal comes up, fighting mad. The conservative backs up, with his hands up. “I though you guys were all about non violence and peace and love”
The protester calms down “You are right, violence never solved anything”
The conservative sucker punches him, knocking the protester out.
(The conservative telling this story, then collapses with laughter, saying how this is the best joke EVER!)

The conservative is bob. When good people stand up for themselves, he gets all outraged, so he can sucker punch them some more.

At the rally, the guy was apparently being a dick so he was asked to leave. Yet according to bob, the cops should not have done that. Apparently order and civility are not allowed in bob’s world for progressives.

The incident with former US Senate Candidate Joe Miller, in my opinion, was deplorable. Since his unprecedented defeat, Miller has shown a willingness to compromise. He actually called for an investigation into a flawed civic election in Anchorage. One would think, and I would say it could go for both sides, when your guy gets elected or re-elected, you would take it and run.(Republican-leaning mayor Dan Sullivan was re-elected in the election I mentioned, and Miller ran in 2010 for Senate winning the GOP Primary but losing to Murkowski’s write-in campaign).

Before I saw the comment on this thread at 212, I was meaning to pass on this little article. Some news that does not make the news, but re-inforces the Railway Age editorial I posted earlier. BNSF investing in trackwork, I see these headlines a lot lately, this time for Montana. If only they would add a second track to the Hi-Line in North Dakota.(Bakkan oil production is creating a big traffic boom, for Railroads large and small, and even Amtrak is seeing an increase on the Empire Builder within North Dakota, especially at Minot and Williston. The trains, both eastbound 8/28(28 is the Portland section), and westbound 7/27 arrive at decent times in Western North Dakota, but Fargo and Grand Forks, it’s about 3AM, in both directions!

He claims to be a Marine and an ex-union firefighter who is afraid to give his name because union thugs are out to get him. Now, I’ll wait and see what comes from the arrest record, of course, but I couldn’t help but notice that my Wingnut-Bullshit-Detector app went into alarm mode with that one.

“[F]rankly, the Romney people did the only thing they could. They used their strengths — which were money and the super PAC and a willingness to go after me very aggressively — to offset my strength, which was an ability to define a larger, better future” Gingrich said. “It’s not bad to say [Romney] has proven he will do what it takes to beat Obama. It’s the nature of our current political culture that cynicism trumps idealism,” the former speaker added, coming very close to calling Romney cynical.

Quite bothersome, actually. I have to run most of the troll comments through the Wingnut-Decoder app, and then run them through the Wingnut-Bullshit-Detector app. What I need is an app that both decodes and detects.

So, Rujax, you want people who disagree with you and who point out your obvious lack of command of the most basic facts of the day, any day, to be banned, so that you can continue to be an imbecile without fear of being called on it?

Really? You want to be able to spew consistently incredibly uninformed blather without consequence?

Not everyone wears the cheerleader uniform, Rujax. Some people like to scrimmage.

when you’re within 30 feet of the President, and you don’t follow a lawful request to move, and, moreover, you stick your finger in a cop’s face and argue, be prepared to be arrested.

When you’re sitting in front of a group of police officers trying to move arrested and handcuffed colleagues of yours to the vehicles so they can be taken to be booked, and your colleagues have the police surrounded, and you don’t follow a lawful request to move and, moreover, you shout “From Davis to Greece, Fuck the Police!!” while the cops are issuing you warnings that you will be pepper-sprayed, be prepared to be pepper-sprayed.

If that is to be tolerated, shouldn’t a single guy holding a sign similarly be tolerated?

Don’t get me wrong – I never claimed @ 206/210 the arrest shouldn’t have occurred. Circumstances do seem curious. I expressed surprise that Barrett would let it happen at a rally in which he has a deficit to overcome.

I’m just pointing out how tolerance of liberal protest by Madison cops seems to differ from how Barrett’s police force handled a single conservative protestor.

It probably differs if they were private events on private property vs. a public forum such as a park rally. I won’t click on your links but if people protested in public spaces without interfering with the rights of others to hear the program, then I probably am in agreement with you.
If it is a private event, that’s different. You can heckle me from the back of the crowd if I’m speaking in a public park. You can’t do it if I’m speaking in my large, fenced back yard and you weren’t invited. Unless you’re on the other side of the fence, I suppose.

He describes the conventional wisdom this way: “If you pour money into rich people, like an ingredient, in the form of lower tax rates, jobs will squirt out of them…which makes people like me job creators.” He thinks that’s nuts.

“Lots of grass will equal lots of zebras, and lots of zebras will create a great situation for the lion. But the opposite is not true. More lions won’t create more zebras. And more zebras won’t create more grass.” Current economic policies, he says, “have made it cozy for the lions.”

“And all that’s happened is that the fat cats have gotten fatter,” he adds. “And that makes no sense.”

His three-plank platform: (1) Raise taxes on the rich and use the money for “investments” that benefit the middle class, or simply give them some of the money. (2) Strengthen unions so that a greater share of national income goes to workers and a lesser one to corporate profits, reversing recent trends. And (3) get tough with China which, he says, is subsidizing its exports to build a bigger middle class at America’s expense.

Why the fuck bother – you might find something that undermines your whining about the Barrett event today.
The links went to stories about people who attended rallies, or attempted to enter public spaces like the National Archives, with shirts saying things like “Protect Our Civil Liberties“ or “Impeach Bush”. This was the Bush Administration in action – and you’re weaseling. Oh, and a story about a journalist who was detained by private non-union thugs in a way that usually constitutes kidnapping.

If civil liberties were really important to you, as opposed to trying to score cheap “union thug” points like you usually do, we’d hear a far different tune…

Imagine a Seattle cop telling that to a OWS protestor in Westlake Park, then arresting him, with that comment captured on video.

They have done far worse than that, which is why they’re the target of a DOJ investigation.

Again, this whining from you is all about trying to score “union thug” points – have you EVER commented on police brutality here? Have you ever protested for the free speech rights of someone you don’t agree with?

You don’t know me, I’m not a one-trick pony, and I make you think. You make me think. It’s why you’re back interacting with me after blowing me off last week. Either before or after your silly despair woe-is-you line that I won’t let you forget any time soon.

You don’t know me, I’m not a one-trick pony, and I make you think. You make me think. It’s why you’re back interacting with me after blowing me off last week. Either before or after your silly despair woe-is-you line that I won’t let you forget any time soon.

06/01/2012 AT 3:48 PM

Dont know if I would have been so forgiving of that asshole bob….maybe that punk needs to go live in North Korea or Syria for a while and then we will see if he shits on the flag.
I can bet you one thing for sure: he is an OWSer asking for “free stuff” and votes D.

Today is the first day you can buy liquor in grocery stores. I stopped by my neighborhood QFC to see how this is working out.

Bottom line: Same prices, smaller selection.

I couldn’t get my favorite French brandy at all. The store manager told me they didn’t get a shipment yet. Maybe two weeks, he said.

QFC is advertising a 1.75-liter bottle of Jack Daniels for $33.99 — but that doesn’t include the 20.5% state liquor tax or the “per liter charge” (whatever that is; I suspect it’s a store add-on) of $3.75/liter. Add those in, and that bottle rings up at $47.52. The now-closed state liquor store in my neighborhood used to sell it for $47.50.

I said this before the election, but now I have proof: Any voter who thought privatizing liquor sales would result in lower prices had his head up his ass.

Then there’s the matter of QFC advertising that $33.99 price. Obviously, it’s highly misleading, if not downright false advertising, to tell the public you’ll sell them a 1.75-liter bottle of Jack Daniels for $33.99 and then ring it up for $47.52 at the register. I won’t mince words: That’s lying.

I asked the store manager whose idea that was. Corporate headquarters, he said. Why don’t they include the taxes and charges in the shelf price so customers know what they’re paying? They want to make it look cheaper, he said. Not smart, I said, the store is just pissing off its customers. The store manager said he’s been hearing a lot of complaints about that from customers today.

Somebody at QFC headquarters has his head up his ass.

Voters and grocery store pricing managers all have their heads up their asses. Is there anyone around here who doesn’t have his head up his ass? Well, me, for one — I walked out of the store with a couple of discounted items in my shopping bag … but no liquor. I’m not buying bullshit today.

@261 No. I’m sick and tired of paying for your goddamned wars and your goddamned military weapons. And I’m even more sick of assholes like you borrowing from China, our enemy, to pay for that shit and give yourselves tax breaks. Fuck you and all your commie-hugging buddies!

Imagine them pepper spraying 80 year old ladies, which they actually did.

06/01/2012 AT 3:40 PM

oh, you mean that silly old broad who’s only purpose in life is to protest shit..ya her..lol

some washed up hippy who thinks its still 1968..

You know in another thread you said “the rules are the rules” and yet when the police break “the rules” and pepper spray someone that wasn’t doing anything wrong you don’t seem to have a problem with it. So I guess it’s not really “the rules are the rules” is it?

263. Roger Rabbit spews:
@261 No. I’m sick and tired of paying for your goddamned wars and your goddamned military weapons. And I’m even more sick of assholes like you borrowing from China, our enemy, to pay for that shit and give yourselves tax breaks. Fuck you and all your commie-hugging buddies!

06/01/2012 AT 4:34 PM

LOL..its your buddies borrowing from China, and then telling us that “its no big deal”(how many times have we heard that here at HA).

@268 Police are getting aggressive about threatening and arresting people simply for filming them making arrests and pepper spraying people — which is not only a legal activity, but a constitutionally protected one. When the police do this, they should be — and are getting — sued. The Boston police department has already had to pay a $170,000 judgment for this. That doesn’t go far enough. Cops who do this should be fired and criminally prosecuted. That seems to be the only thing that makes them understand we citizens have constitutional rights, and those rights are more than a scrap of paper for cops to stomp on at their discretion.

283
You know, if he just cut the crap and said he enjoyed seeing DFH’s getting pepper-sprayed, I’d be fine with that. It’s obviously not about everyone following the rules, it’s about liking people he doesn’t like facing violence. So why not just say it?

And…my pin-headed friend, I don’t attack religion per se – oh, no. Let me explain, and I’ll try to use small words so you might understand.

As I have said many times on this blog, if you have a faith, a religion, that brings you to the Golden Rule, that leads you to teach peace, that inspires you to make the world a better place, that advances what I understand to be Jesus’ supreme law – LOVE, then EXCELLENT!! I’m right there with you, good on you, keep it up, Praise Whomever (Steve Schwartz even!)

No no no – what I attack is nasty hatred hiding behind a Bible, affirmative idiocy like Creationism, the relentless drive to undermine the integrity of what we teach our children with the poison of superstition. I will rail day and night about bigotry and hatred and aggressive stupidity and Republicanism hiding behind ostentatious religiocity.

Roger Rabbit Commentary: I’m not saying non-citizens should be allowed to vote; they shouldn’t. But innocent people shouldn’t go to jail (or be executed; see Rick Perry viz. Todd Cameron Willingham), either. Under our system of government, we believe it’s better to let an occasional guilty person go free than imprison (or, heaven forbid, put to death) innocent people.

This same reasoning should apply to voting: We’re a democracy, and excluding thousands of legitimate voters from the polls to keep a handful of illegitimate ones from voting is just too high a price to pay for a “perfect” election that won’t happen anyway. (Hell, election worker mistakes probably account for more ballot counting errors than illegal voting.)

Well, here’s an idea. Let political parties scrub voters lists all they want to. But require them to post a sufficient bond and pay every legal voter they scrub $10,000 in liquidated damages. If Republicans want to kick 50,000 voters off the rolls, they have to post $500,000,000 bond, and every legal voter they kick off the rolls gets to keep 10G of it.

So, for every ACORN (or whatever ACORN has morphed into) false voter registration, let’s withdraw $10,000 from ACORN’s operating fund. If ACORN wants to register voters in areas in which they have filed obviously false registrations previously, they have to post a bond, from which all penalties will be drawn.

Today’s plunge of 275 Dow points in the stock market may serve as a catalyst for QE3. But I hope not.

The Federal Reserve was right to inject cash into the financial system in 2008. That’s because cash hoarding sucked trillions of dollars out of circulation, effectively shrinking the money supply, which could have triggered a deflationary “death spiral.” It’s like giving transfusions to an accident victim who has lost a lot of blood, so he doesn’t die.

But QE2 was a different story. There, the Fed was trying to stimulate the economy, with only marginal effectiveness (if that much). Instead of going into the economy, that money went into financial markets, artificially pushing up prices of commodities and stocks, which is one of the reasons you’re paying so much for food and gasoline now.

A QE3 likely would have no stimulus effect at all. It’ll just create more market distortions, especially in interest rates. The rates on long-term Treasuries already are at never-before-seen lows.

The theory behind quantitative easing is pushing down interest rates below market levels encourages borrowing, which in turn boosts spending, which stimulates hiring. But you get that stimulus only if banks lend, consumers borrow, and companies hire. With interest rates already artifically pushed to historic low, none of those things are happening. As Wikipedia points out,

“Quantitative easing … can fail if banks remain reluctant to lend money to small business and households in order to spur demand.”

They could have added, “or if consumers have no taste for borrowing and spending, even at the lower rates.”

An unemployed person with no income isn’t going to qualify for a mortgage or car loan, and a consumer struggling to “delever” won’t take on more debt, no matter how low interest rates go. What the economy needs is more jobs, not cheaper money.

The Fed’s policy of keeping interest lows low for a prolonged period doesn’t really help debtors, except those with variable interest rate loans, because for everyone else their rates are locked in by their loan contracts. And if they’re having trouble paying on those loans, they’re hardly going to take out more loans in order to take advantage of low lending rates.

On the other hand, keeping interest rates at or near zero is a gut punch to retirees and senior citizens who have to live on investment income. The decline in their income means they have to spend less, causing further economic contraction, and forcing them to liquidate savings because they can’t earn any income from their savings means they will continue to spend less in the future — permanently.

Cheap money also corrodes the foundation of capitalism by altering the capital formation process by creating a corporate bias in favoring of selling bonds instead of stock. In fact, right now, many companies are borrowing billions to buy back their own stock. Carried to its logical extremity, this ultimately reduces ownership by shareholders to zero. Who, then, do managements and boards answer to? No one. And is having companies capitalized with 100% debt good for the economy? It seems just a matter of time before economic conditions would come along to tumble that house of cards. Then, instead of a depression with 25% unemployment (1930s), how about a depression with 100% unemployment? You won’t have an Occupy Wall Street then; you’ll have violent revolution and overthrow.

In short, quantitative easing had its usefulness at the beginning of the financial crisis, but is counterproductive now. We’re hearing a lot of bleating from Wall Street for more quantitative easing. That’s because QE3 would push up stock prices and the Wall Street bleaters will profit from that. They shouldn’t be listened to. Not by the Federal Reserve, and not by you or me.

For the reasons outlined above, there should be no QE3. It’s time Federal Reserve policy stopped sucking up to Wall Street and began serving Main Street.

@298 I’ll agree to your proposal if you’ll agree to my proposal. I’ll even go you one better, and this doesn’t even require new legislation: If someone submits a false voter registration, prosecute him/her, and make him/her pay a fine and/or do jail time.

But I’d also like to extend that principle to people (see, e.g., Lori Sotelo) who file perjured affidavits to challenge voter registrations. That doesn’t require new legislation, either, it only needs a politically unbiased prosecutor (do not see, e.g., Dan Satterberg) who will enforce the laws we already have.

“But the above was a serious question, RR. What if Obama needs it to be re-elected?”

Right now it’s hard for me to visualize any scenario in which Obama loses to a candidate as lame as Romney, but if you’ll allow me to give a hypothetical answer to your hypothetical question, I disagree with Bernanke’s easing policy independently of, and regardless of, wat Obama needs to get re-elected. In any case, I don’t see how a Federal Reserve policy that’s not stimulating the economy helps Obama get re-elected if he needs a better economy to get re-elected, which is by no means a given. But even if QE3 made the difference between Obama winning or losing in November, I would still be against QE3 for all the reasons I stated @300 plus the fact I think ineffectual government interventions in markets that create market distortions is a bad thing. Unequivocally, period, without qualifications or exceptions, and all that.

If what your driving at is the tendency of politicians in an elective democracy to manipulate government policies to give their own re-election a boost in an election year, then yes, that’s a serious issue that merits serious discussion, but what’s your suggested solution for that?

I think the immediate direction any such discussion should go is as follows. The Federal Reserve was putatively structured to insulate monetary policymakers from partisan politics, but there is some question of whether they really are. So, the first question is, are they? And if we conclude they’re not, then what should our response be? Get rid of the Federal Reserve altogether, as Randroids want to do? Restructure it to increase its distance from partisan influences? Can that be done with some tweaking, or does it require major reorganization?

Or, is the system working okay, but Ben Bernanke is simply wrong? In which case, what to do about that? Bernanke was a Bush appointee; if he’s jettisoned when the position next comes up for appointment, I won’t weep over his departure; but I’ll want to see who/what President Obama or President Romney intends to replace him with. Bring Greenspan back? Hell no, if those two are my only choices, I’ll take Ben, and that’s not even like asking, “Would you rather be hanged or shot?”

Another question to ask is, is the Fed chair simply too powerful? Is Greenspan or Bernanke or Whoever too much a Committee of One? Should we give the other Fed governors expanded say, and maybe bring in the regional Federal Reserve Bank presidents and give them expanded power over monetary policy, too? In other words, replace the Committee of One with a committee of many? Or is this like asking whether a Poliburo works better than a Generalissimo?

Bernanke is smarter than me, and knows more about economics than I do, especially on the subject of what causes depressions and/or makes them worse. I’ve taken that into account and still find myself disagreeing with him, and not just because other people who are smarter and more credentialed than me disagree with him, too.

I think this is one of those areas where nobody knows the answer for sure, so when the Fed tries something, you look at whether it’s working, and if it doesn’t seem to be, any rational rabbit is going to conclude that maybe the policy guys should try something else. What was it Einstein said about trying the same thing over and over, and getting the same result? I’m pretty sure Bernanke is familiar with that idea, at least, he should be.

My thought is let’s try something simple: Get the government out of the market and let market forces work to bring the economy back into balance. That will have to happen anyway, and the more you create market distortions with government tinkering, the longer it’ll take.

So stop oversteering the car and let it track by itself, assuming the suspension isn’t bent; who knows, it might go straighter than you can steer it. The same principle applies to how a pilot should operate a properly trimmed airplane (ask Darryl about that one if you don’t understand it).

One thing (certainly not the only thing) I’d like to see happen is for stock prices to find their own level without being pushed in one direction or another by some guy in a leather swivel chair behind a mahogany desk in a marble palace in Washington D.C. You can’t figure out what you should pay for a stock when someone behind a curtain is making it dance on a string.

(Think “yo-yo” and you’re not far off what investors have to cope with right now; which, needless to say, is keeping a lot of investors out of the market. If Bernanke wants stock prices to go up, he should try letting go of the string. That would bring more people into the market, and their buying would push up stock prices far more effectively than he can.)

The first really lucid comment you’ve written in a long time Roger Rabbit.

After your picture attack it was cogent, thoughtful and eloquent. My hat off to you Roger. I really mean it. Something Lib da Schmuck could never write in a million years with a centillion * centillion tries. When you shed that stupid libtard persona you are ok.

So, does a Fed Chairman or a Fed bank head make a great Secretary of the Treasury?

Bob, the Elizabeth Warren house flipping story is great, but now she’s blowing off her “compatriots“.

Warren released a detailed email about the controversy to supporters yesterday in an attempt to stop the bleeding. She admitted telling Harvard and University of Pennsylvania officials about her purported Native American heritage, even though she originally had said she didn’t know how the universities found out about her background.

So how do you know a libtard is lying? They continue to revise their “story”!

FOund this article on a facebook link from passenger advocacy group All Aboard Washington about the latest on TALGO suddenly going at it in Wisconsin. Apparently their US Head is calling us a Third World Country(this coming from a Spanish Company). Judging from the article, it seems the TALGO CEO may have just seen the movie Network, as it looks like he could not take his company being trashed by these politicians anymore.(Must be tough for a guy from a country where thhey do elections differently, and are more likely to have to work together).

For the San Francisco Municipal Railway, which turns 100 this year, historic rolling stock keeps on rolling on the F-Market and Wharves streetcar line. What does not get much press, is a vehicle used behind the scenes. Sound Transit and Metro use trucks for track repairs, but in Frisco, they still use a track repair car, car C-1, is 96 years old(only 4 years newer than historic streetcar No.1). Might as well stick with what works. Car No.1 was still in revenue service at the turn of the 20th Century until wiring problems sidelined it, and somebody parked it outside exposed to the elements. They got it back last year from a rebuild in Pennsylvania, and have rededicated it.

Now this was something interesting in Frisco last year. Mayor Ed Lee was elected into a term in his own right, and something that struck me about him. He did not grandstand that much. Politicians like ribbon cutting ceremonies prior to the election.

@306 “So, does a Fed Chairman or a Fed bank head make a great Secretary of the Treasury?”

S/he might or might not, depending on qualifications, experience, and intangible factors such as leadership qualities. In general, making policy at the Federal Reserve and supervising the IRS are two different jobs. So it’s not obvious to me that a Fed Chairman is a logical choice for Treasury Secretary.

Apparently the IG’s mention of all of that green jobs money going to ‘friends and family’ wasn’t in the report.

It was out of the IG’s mouth during testimony:

The Department of Energy’s inspector general, Gregory Friedman, who was not a political appointee, chastised the alternative-energy loan and grant programs for their absence of “sufficient transparency and accountability.” He has testified that contracts have been steered to “friends and family.”

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